The Wise and the Wicked

by Rebecca Podos

  Lisichka, you’re here because of us.

  In another two weeks it would be her own birthday—seventeen seemed old and young at once—and she couldn’t help feeling that when she woke on April 16, the countdown to her final birthday would truly begin. Yet here she was, waiting on her mother to come home once more, scrabbling at pieces of a puzzle she couldn’t make fit.

  Except Ruby wasn’t ten years old anymore. She wasn’t helpless, and Evelina wasn’t the only one who’d grown up in Polina’s house.

  The Meeting of Moms was known to gather from 10:00 to 11:00 a.m. every Sunday at the long back table of the Busy Bean Café, Saltville’s only coffee shop outside of the Dunkin’ Donuts. Ruby arrived, as planned, when the group was just breaking up, stopping briefly at the counter to buy two small black coffees. She spotted Aunt Annie in the crowd by her hair, the same winter-blond as Cece’s but ironed into a glossy sheet. Her aunt stood chatting with a fellow MoM mom while collecting her purse and coat, but when Ruby materialized in front of her, she dropped back onto the cushioned bench with a soft whuff.

  “Ruby?” she asked, incredulous.

  She had counted on this, catching Aunt Annie off guard. In their world and surrounded by family, she was composed, cagey about delicate subjects. Among normal people, exposed by daylight, she was vulnerable.

  “Can I sit?” Ruby asked, sitting already.

  “What . . . are you doing here?”

  Ruby didn’t have a perfect answer prepared, because she wasn’t certain herself. She didn’t know what the mysterious Pyotr had to do with any of it, let alone their quest to change her Time. But he seemed important, and Carl Sagan himself would’ve told her to collect all available facts before proceeding. Kerrigan Black, as well. And though she could have waited for Evelina to come back and make sense of him, it seemed more and more like every passing minute counted for so much.

  “I bought us coffees.” Ruby slid one peppermint-striped mug across the whimsically rough wooden tabletop.

  Her aunt took it cautiously, but smiled, as if she suspected the cup was poisoned but was too polite to say so. “Is this a happy coincidence?” she asked brightly.

  “Actually, I wanted to talk to you,” she admitted, then charged in. “About Pyotr Volkov.”

  “Who?” Annie asked. Her tone was untroubled, in a way Ruby didn’t think she could fake; she didn’t recognize the name.

  “The widower? The man who lived in Polina’s house first.”

  At that, something slid closed in her aunt’s eyes, like storm shutters over windows. She picked up her mug, staring into the steam, then set it back without drinking. “That was a very long time ago, and there’s not much to say about it. You should try looking forward in life, Ruby. Some history isn’t worth dredging up.”

  “That’s not what Mom says.”

  Now Annie’s lips parted in surprise. Her jam-colored lipstick had bled in one corner, Ruby noticed, and it might have been the most unkempt she’d ever seen her aunt. Either that, or she’d never looked too closely before.

  She was looking now.

  “It’s so nice to hear you and my sister are rebuilding your relationship,” Aunt Annie said, but the smudged corner of her mouth pulled slightly downward. “Even if she hasn’t had the decency to speak to the rest of us. Perhaps she expects us to—” She stopped abruptly, took a sip of her coffee, restored her casual composure. “Have you seen much of her?”

  “Not a lot.” The last thing she needed was for Annie to call Dahlia and Ginger, anxious to tell them what their little sister had been getting up to when they had no idea Ruby and her mother were meeting. “But Mom said our family and the widower’s family might have known each other in Russia.” Or she would’ve, Ruby reasoned, if Evelina were around to ask.

  “Well, I don’t know any more than your mother does.”

  “Did you know he died in his thirties?”

  Aunt Annie’s gaze darted between the moms still milling about, comparing soccer scores and schedules over the dregs of their lattes. “Why are we talking about this, Ruby?” She kept her voice low.

  “The truth that wasn’t in the stories.” She let her own voice rise so that the nearest women paused in their conversation, glancing over with interest.

  Aunt Annie clasped her mug, knuckles white around the handle, perhaps to stop herself from grabbing Ruby. She leaned in, smile souring to a grimace. “I don’t know the truth,” she gritted out. “Just what your mom and I used to talk about in bed when we were your and Cece’s age. It’s all rumors.”

  “Then I want to hear them.”

  Her aunt shrugged helplessly, eyes rolling. “I don’t know, Ruby. People said a lot of things—they talk when they have nothing better to do. They said Polina and the widower were . . . that there was a romance between them. One of the old women who lived down the road claimed he got her with child, but she lost it after he died. It was mean gossip. When we were in middle school, one of the kids told us that his mother told him our aunt had poisoned the man she worked for to get his house—that’s the sort of gossip I’m talking about. He died of an asthma attack; it was in the newspaper. Ev and I saw a copy, back when they kept old papers in the library basement.”

  “Why were you looking?”

  Aunt Annie paused.

  “If you knew it was all stupid rumors, why’d you have to check?”

  To her surprise, a tiny laugh bubbled up from her aunt’s berry lips. “Maybe we wondered, for a second. Polina was complicated, Ruby. She wasn’t everything they said she was, but she wasn’t . . . somebody you want to grow up to be like. Polina was right, though. We’ll be safe so long as we keep our heads down. So long as we don’t go looking for trouble.” Then she stood abruptly, slinging her purse over her shoulder. “Your mother should know that better than anyone.”

  With a last long look at Ruby, she pasted on a polite smile, stopping here or there to say goodbye as she made her way out of the coffee shop.

  • Thirty •

  “Tell me a story,” Ruby said.

  “What kind?” Dov asked, tipping his head back against the driver’s seat of his truck to stare out the windshield.

  Together, they watched people come and go through the doors of the Cone Zone. It was busy for a Thursday night, and a cold one, the black clouds over the roof heavy with what might be the last snow of the season. But the place had only just opened for spring, and there wasn’t much else to do in Saltville. The marquee out front with its rotating border of pastel twinkle lights advertised:

  THIS WEEK’S DANGER CONE IS . . . BUTTERED LOBSTER!

  Ruby had been tempted out of habit. She’d fought the impulse and picked a simple strawberry cone. Dov’s rocky road was wild by comparison. But it had been almost a week since she’d cornered Aunt Annie in the coffee shop, and with her mother yet to return, no new leads, and her seventeenth birthday just over a week away, Ruby felt anxious all the time, her muscles tight and her brain cranked up to eleven. So tonight, she’d chosen comfort over adventure.

  “I don’t care,” she said, licking a thick pink rivulet from her thumb. “Just a story where the good guys always win and there aren’t any bad guys.”

  “How can there even be good guys if there are no bad guys?”

  Ruby considered this. “Okay, fine. A story where nice things happen to nice people, and everybody gets what they want. No conflict whatsoever.”

  “So, a fantasy.” Dov laughed, but not bitterly, the way Ginger would have.

  “Sure. But no magic, either . . . no offense.”

  “None taken.” He set his plastic bowl of rocky road in the cup holder—Dov preferred bowls to cones so that he could savor the ice cream even after it melted—and took her free hand in his, lacing their fingers together. “Once upon a time, there was, um, a young scientist. A scientist who worked in a lab. And one day there was an explosion that sent her back in time through—”

  “Uuuuugh,” Ruby groaned.

  “Through scie
nce,” Dov plowed ahead. “At first she was pretty nervous, because time travel is, like, some serious shit. But then!” He held his finger in the air, jerking her hand upward where it was still linked with his. “She realized that she had actually been transported to a beautiful farm full of puppies. And butterflies. And dolphins.”

  “Oh yes, the famous dolphin fields of Pennsylvania.”

  “Exactly—maybe you’ve heard this story before.” He paused to scoop a bite of rocky road, quickly transitioning to soup under the dashboard vents. “And basically, she had a great day playing with the puppies. She had some lunch—a nice sandwich—and took a nap in some wildflowers, and then she was sent back home. Through science. She went to bed early, which was also enjoyable, because she was kind of tired.”

  “That’s a terrible story.” Ruby rolled down the window to toss her half-eaten cone at the trash can by the curb, then slumped to the side so she could rest her head on Dov’s shoulder.

  He leaned over the stick shift to make it easier for her, even though it was an awkward position for him. “I thought you wanted a happy ending.”

  “I guess I did.”

  “Your turn. You tell me a story.”

  She sighed, scrubbing her cheek into his scratchy-soft wool sweater. “What kind?”

  “A true one. About you. Your life, before I knew you.”

  “Okay . . . Once upon a time when I was really little, I was in the car with my mom, and I was mad at her. Who knows over what. To make me feel better, she drove us out to this tiny, tin-roofed ice cream stand on Magnolia Street with plastic flamingos along the walkway. I don’t remember the name of it, but it was our favorite place until the Cone Zone opened and put it out of business. Mom bought us each a Bomb Pop to eat at the picnic table out front. But I was still pissed about . . . whatever, so I refused to get out of the car even though it was, like, dead summer and sweltering. My mom sat at the table all by herself, a Popsicle in each hand, just sort of licking half-heartedly, but mostly letting them melt into the dirt. And neither of us got what we wanted.”

  Why that particular memory had surfaced, she wasn’t sure, except that she’d been thinking a lot about her childhood lately. About the time before her Time, before her mother left, and before she knew what was coming for her. It wasn’t the best feeling—she both pitied and missed and resented kid Ruby for her innocence, her softness—but it was still easier than thinking about the future.

  Ruby hadn’t given up hope. How could she, now that she and her mother were so close to fixing things? She had faith in their powers, in their birthright, and, though she never would’ve believed it, in her mother. Evelina was on her side, willing to do whatever it took to save her. And—unlike Cece, though she hated to think it—Evelina was just as hungry as Ruby.

  Still . . . so much remained uncertain. And sometimes, usually when she was alone in the dark with her thoughts, the future whirled in the near distance like a black hole: terrifyingly inevitable in its gravitational pull, capable of wonders, sure, but also of utter destruction.

  Better not to be alone, if she could help it.

  Dov squeezed her fingers between his. “Wow. You are . . . really bad at happy endings, Ruby Chernyavsky. There were, like, zero dolphins in that story.”

  She shrugged her shoulder against his. “I’ll work on it,” she said, snuggling closer.

  If the future was a black hole, then Dov was a sun.

  And when a quick, acid flash of guilt over her and her mother’s scheming threatened to curdle her momentary happiness, she replayed their conversation in Petey’s basement:

  Did they know you were a Volkov?

  I’m not. I’m a Mahalel.

  The Volkovs were their enemies, not Dov. He didn’t belong to them anymore—they’d cast him out in the first place. He only wanted to be free.

  So why couldn’t they each have what they wanted? Who was to say that a happy ending wasn’t possible for them both?

  By two days before her birthday, hope and fear had swirled into a small storm inside of Ruby. So it was that she came home from school, heart thundering, to find her mother on their sofa, perched on the very edge of a couch cushion with a cup of tea between her hands.

  “What—”

  Evelina cut her eyes to the kitchen doorway, where Dahlia suddenly stood with her own steaming mug, a stack of papers under one arm. She stopped short when she saw Ruby.

  Their mother was first to speak. “Dahlia left a message with the desk manager at my motel last week—I’ve been out of town visiting an old friend. She asked me here to go over some of the details of Polina’s estate. And I wanted to give Dahlia her birthday present. Belated, alas.”

  Ruby noticed the package at her feet, wrapped in paper that might belong at a baby shower: a parade of elephants held pink balloons twined around their trunks, and a massive bow exploded out of crossed pink ribbons.

  “I didn’t think you’d be home till three,” Dahlia said, casting anxious eyes back and forth between Ruby and Evelina.

  “We got out early,” Ruby said, slightly breathless. “Substitute teacher.”

  Untrue—she’d left class halfway through Italian, claiming cramps. She hadn’t expected her sister to be home yet, either.

  “Dahlia, can we . . . do you mind if I have a few minutes alone with your sister?” their mother asked—not as if she expected obedience, but with respect, like a guest in the house.

  “Ruby?” her sister asked.

  She nodded. “It’s fine.”

  “Okay. If you’re sure.” Dahlia looked into her eyes until she felt her skin prickle, and glanced away. “Let me put this stuff back,” Dahlia said, “and I’ll just . . . I’ll run down to the store really quick. We need . . . milk.”

  Ruby and her mother sat in silence while Dahlia got her coat. She squeezed Ruby’s arm on her way out.

  The second the door shut behind her, Evelina relaxed back into the couch, resting her cup between her knees. As she did, she scanned the tiny living room, and Ruby saw it all anew through her mother’s eyes. The rugged coffee table they’d hauled home from a garage sale five years ago. Pizza menus and potato chip crumbs strewn beside Dahlia’s salt lamp. The faded ’90s wallpaper, green pinstripes with a row of dancing palm trees bordering the low popcorn ceiling. The little TV, silent for once. “How long have you all been here?”

  “Almost six years.”

  Her mother’s face was a careful mask. “We’ll get you out of here. Polina left me her house in the will, did you know?”

  Ruby shook her head.

  “That’s why Dahlia wanted to see me. She called the motel desk and left a message asking to come by, but I asked to come here. I was hoping to see you. Do you have something for me?”

  Wildly, Ruby thought her mother was asking for a present of her own, until she remembered her mission. She shed her backpack and burrowed into the front pouch, finding Talia’s bracelet. It was so thin between her fingers, the charms like little pieces of foil she could pinch and ruin if she wanted to.

  She paused before pulling it out. “Mom . . . do you remember that ice cream shop? The little one on Magnolia Street? With the flamingoes? What was that place called?”

  Her mother blinked. “I don’t know, Ruby. I . . . maybe it was called Scoops N’ Smiles? Or Smiles N’ Sprinkles?” Evelina touched her fingers to Polina’s locket, apparently ever-present these days. “I haven’t thought of that place in a long time,” she said softly.

  “We went there once because I was mad at you, didn’t we?” Ruby pressed. “I was just wondering . . . if maybe you knew why. What had happened.”

  “I can’t say that I do. Why—”

  “And remember that haunted hayride we went on when I was ten? At that farm with the corn maze? I know I was scared, but I don’t actually remember the ride. Do you?”

  “I don’t.” Her mother frowned. “Does that really matter right now?”

  Ruby felt that it did. She felt that everything that had ev
er happened between her and Evelina mattered a great deal. Because they kept using big words like family and blood. But if they couldn’t remember the moments that had made them—every stupid fight and sweet lullaby and nothing afternoon passed as mother and daughter so long ago—then who would they be to each other once the ritual was behind them, and they had time to just be? They would be Chernyavskys, of course. Always that. But . . . who else?

  Mrs. Mahalel was not simply a Volkov, or some dude in a Cossack hat with a hunting rifle, but Dov’s mother, as Talia was his sister. And they had six more years of accumulated memories than Ruby and her mother did. Weren’t their lives made up of moments and lullabies and fights and ice cream shops and hayrides?

  Shouldn’t that matter too?

  Evelina held out her hand, eager-eyed and impatient. “Let’s prioritize here, zerkal’tse. Time is literally of the essence. Did you get what we need?”

  Ruby shook her head to clear it. “I did . . . but it’s not from Mrs. Mahalel,” she said, keeping hold of the delicate metal. “It’s her daughter’s.”

  Something shifted in her mother’s face so quickly—a shadow briefly cast by a cloud over the sun—that Ruby didn’t recognize the expression before it had passed.

  “Will that not work?” Ruby asked, not sure which answer she was hoping for.

  “It’ll serve,” her mother said at last.

  Ruby pulled the bracelet out of her backpack but held it to her chest, surprising herself.

  Evelina let her hand drop into her lap. “What is it? Why are you acting like this? Did something happen while I was gone?”

  She listened as Ruby recounted her discovery in Polina’s paperwork, the ambush she’d set for Aunt Annie, and her aunt’s warning. “She said I didn’t want to be like Polina. And she said you should know better.”